Why does the story of the hero’s journey mean so much to human beings? Why has it inspired them for at least 50,000 years, found in human storying from cave paintings to a plethora of blockbuster media products from the 21st century?
The hero’s journey
I first asked myself this question 25 years ago, when I started my PhD research. This involved observing children aged between four and six, while they were absorbed in free play, in breaks during the school day.
I started with theories that had been created by anthropologists whose main purpose had been comparing physical elements between human and animal play. But the more I observed, the more I noted that children’s play was very different, because there was always a story involved.
Even the simplest chasing play quickly became cops and robbers or superheroes and villains; in essence, concepts in popular culture with which children were engaging at that time. One issue I hadn’t initially grasped was the hold that the football heroes of that era had upon the children’s imagination. No football game was played without the children claiming to be one or other of these players, with only the very best players allowed by the others to be Beckham!
From the cave and the playground to the silver screen
I began attempting to pull together all the previous psychological research (quite patchy at that time) on how children engage with cultural heroes in their play, and discovered that by far the most compelling stories, not just those used by children, but by humankind in general, were variations on a generic ‘hero narrative’, which has been present in human storytelling for at least 50,000 years.
It has been proposed that human minds contain a narrative function that shapes the stories human beings tell themselves and each other, that across time and culture contain a basic set of archetypes – characters and events that are present in stories, regardless of the time or culture in which they are told.
The basic ‘hero narrative’ tells a story of people who leave their community on a journey to discover something important, whether an item, person, skill or idea, facing a range of trials along the way. Some who undertake such a journey will fail, but those who manage to reach their goal discover they have gained experience that changes them for the better, and typically, they will bring some type of prize back to their community to enrich it in some way.
It is present in countless stories across world religions, myths and folk and fairy tales, and in myriad current entertainment media; for just a few examples: Marvel/ DC/Manga films and comics, the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars sagas.
In 2017, cave paintings were discovered in Indonesia which depict mythical beings with animal heads hunting wild pigs and small bull-like animals. These have been dated to approximately 50,000 years ago. It is a key finding that demonstrates those who produced this picture did so from the basis of a ‘storying’ mind, because the artist depicts mythical humanoids with human bodies and animal heads. For us, this painting stands as the first example not only of human storying, but also specifically hero’s journey storying.
The never-ending story
The fact that I had found this primeval narrative dominating such very young children’s play at the dawn of the 21st century became the element of the research that most fascinated me and it went on to underpin the central content of my thesis.
As time went by, I found myself constantly contemplating the presence of the hero’s journey in stories told in contemporary fiction and entertainment media.
The most recent blockbuster of this nature is Netflix’s Stranger Things, arising from the 1980s hero-focused game Dungeons and Dragons. The final episode played out with the David Bowie 1977 hit, Heroes, in which he sings “we can be heroes, just for one day”. This evokes the nostalgia of the franchise, which is set in an era when people now in their 50s and early 60s were teenagers.
Heroes and antiheroes
The ‘hero’ message can also be subverted, for example by contemporary social media influencers (e.g. in the rantings of the odious Andrew Tate) and in the stories that divisive politicians and reactionaries tell their followers about creating enemies to annihilate or subjugate. Jonathan Gottschall writes at length about this phenomenon in The Story Paradox.
Like Gottschall, the main issue that has been troubling me recently is the siren song of the ‘antihero hero’ which was recently poignantly demonstrated by talented young actor Owen Cooper in the frame of toxic masculinity via Netflix’s 2025 surprise hit, Adolescence.
The blurring of heroes and antiheroes in oppressive society is not new. In modern times, the concept nestled at the heart of punk rock, and is strongly expressed in the Strangler’s No More Heroes.
Here, they list a bunch of anti-establishment heroes from a wide range of factual and fictional sources: Trotsky, Lenny Bruce, Elmyra (Elmyr de Hory, a talented art forger), Sancho Panza and Shakespeare (who had a track record of slyly poking fun at Tudor society). There is also an implicit reference to Nero, (who “watched his Rome burn.”)
Nero started his reign by offering support to the poor and imposing taxes on the rich, but as time went by, he became corrupted by the immensity of his power. No More Heroes therefore seems to be an analogous criticism of post-war Western society, written at the dawn of the Reagan/ Thatcher era of unregulated capitalism; the culture that we still inhabit today.
No more heroes, anymore
It is clear that the way that Western political structures have evolved from the 1980s onwards give very little space for anyone but the super-rich to feel like heroes.
Many children in contemporary anglophone nations receive a zero tolerance/ transmit and test education that does not reward original thought, action or innovation. While children absorb media that pumps many versions of the hero’s journey at them, they are given very little freedom to roam independently, or to form their own opinions about their lives and futures, or arenas in which to freely experiment with their own ideas.
The freedom demonstrated by the children in Stranger Things (and many other media products) must truly seem to them like a long-lost world. Contemporary children communicate and ‘play’ online, but this is an ersatz version of human socialisation and endeavour. On entering young adulthood, many take out enormous loans to enter higher education, and start working life in huge debt to the state.
The hero inside yourself?
The majority of entry roles available to early career employees give them little chance to innovate; many work in systems that are tightly technologically defined and managerially monitored in conditions in which it is far more difficult to subvert/innovate than in pre-information technology dominated times. There is little manual work available in which people can aspire to physical heroism. One field where heroism is still possible is sport, but this is reserved for the few who excel.
The 1995 M People song, Search For The Hero esoterically proposes:
You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself
Search for the secrets you hide
Search for the hero inside yourself
Until you find the key to your life.
This is, however, rather more abstract than the experience of every human generation prior to the dawn of the 21st century. Until such time, opportunities to undertake a hero’s journey were lived out in real life, not ‘inside the self’. Many young people, bowed under the panopticon society of our current time, become lost and some will then be tempted towards the copious antihero contexts that have sprung up from such disillusionment.
‘My father was a toolmaker’
When we look at our under-30s population through the reality of their lives against the panhuman lure of the hero’s journey narrative, the ennui they experience becomes far more understandable. Keir Starmer’s A Letter to my Son makes far more sense considered through the narrative of the hero’s journey (and ‘my father was a toolmaker’ is another such construction.) The problem is, all that is being offered by him here is dreams, memories and hopes rather than any concrete solutions.
Faux solutions are instead being offered by populists; ‘antihero heroes’ creating enemies to destroy and subjugate; presenting them as equivalent to the prey that people at the dawn of time drew on cave walls. The hero’s journey is being subverted, and no one in public life seems to be thinking about how to create a practical challenge to the journey of the ‘antihero hero’.
Meeting the challenge of the antihero hero
Moderate politicians like Starmer must find ways to develop opportunities that give many more ordinary people opportunities to live out their own life journeys as heroes rather than as corporatised drones. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap. But it is preferable by far to unchallenged populists, on a quest to divide and conquer democratic Western society, capturing and subverting the primeval hero’s journey narrative which has inspired human beings for over 50,000 years.
Pam Jarvis explores the concept of ‘The hero’s journey’ more extensively in Shaping a story: the journey of a hero on her blog, The On Time series: when in the world do you want to go.
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